


Ask No Land Beyond

by bloodbright



Series: Dishonored works [1]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Gen, High Chaos (Dishonored), High Chaos Emily Kaldwin, Morley (Dishonored), Post-Dishonored 2 (Video Game), high chaos is your warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-20 16:33:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11924829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodbright/pseuds/bloodbright
Summary: In Morley, they still practice the old religion.In which Emily visits Wyman and meets his family.





	Ask No Land Beyond

In Morley, they still practice the old religion.

The Morley Insurrection ended three years before Jessamine Kaldwin was born. Fifty years later the children the Abbey takes from Morley are still sent to Whitecliff, and from there to serve in Wei-Ghon or Samara or Dunwall. They never come home.

The sailors have spent the entire voyage making surreptitious gestures toward the figurehead on the prow when they think Emily can’t see them. Now, as the ship draws into harbor, the stiffly formal captain tosses three coins over the rail and follows them with spit.

They were meant to arrive at noon, but it’s late in the day as Emily steps off the gangplank alone. No entourage for her on this trip. She’s proven that she doesn’t need one; and Corvo is in Karnaca, securing his new dukedom.

Back in Dunwall the Tower remains a mess of construction; Delilah’s plants have done damage to the structure itself. There’s a handful of leaks that no one can seem to find the source of.

The remaining traitors have been hanged. Their bodies swing from Kaldwin’s Bridge. Birds have long since picked away their eyes and most of their flesh; what remains is drying brittle in the summer sun and starting to fall in chunks. Meanwhile, the few aristocrats who returned to the city have dispersed to their country estates for the season, and so Emily has the breathing room to make a trip of her own.

From the dock she can see the imperial garrison, fortified on a high bluff overlooking the harbor, flying the flag of the Empire above that of Morley. If this were an official visit, she’d have to check in there, and then they’d hoist another flag bearing the Kaldwin crest and give her a guard to surround her carriage wherever she went; Caulkenny is not Dunwall, and the common people of Morley are generally reputed to have more courage than good sense.

Instead she waits down here on the quay, watching the longshoremen at their work: loading wide-bottomed freighters with

barrels of salt pork and crates of dry-packed bacon, sacks of wheat and potatoes, firkins of butter, oysters packed in oil, great slabs of honeycomb, calves lowing for their mothers; not to mention the bales of wool and stacks of sheepskins, all bound for foreign ports. Morley mutters about independence but is happy to take Gristol coin, and Gristol depends on imports to feed its ever-growing populace. Even in the years after the insurrection, while Morley starved, the shipments continued under armed guard.

But those are thoughts for court; and anyway, Emily doesn’t have to wait much longer there on the dock before Wyman comes galloping up in a clatter of hooves, windblown and laughing—as handsome as she remembers, with his green eyes and chestnut curls.

“Emily!” he cries, leaping off his horse. She’s tall but he’s even taller; he wraps her in an embrace and lifts her off her feet.

“It’s so good to see you,” he says after kisses have been exchanged at some length. “I’m so glad you’re safe.”

“You know I can take care of myself,” she says.

“Of course you can,” he says, and kisses her again.

Morley is a beautiful green country. They ride up through the rolling hills with the long shadows growing. With the evening mist rising around them, it’s easy to believe she’s in a land of ghosts and spirits. Haunted.

They’d been drunk and silly on too much whiskey when Wyman whispered the tales of his country to her: the banshee, whose wailing portends death; the sluagh, who descend in a flock from the west to steal the souls of the dying. The dearg-due, who once a year rises from her grave to seduce men and suck the blood out of them—

“—but not until after she’s sucked something else, so it’s fine,” Wyman said.

“Is that a hint,” Emily said. He waggled his eyebrows at her.

Two nights later she’d returned to her bedroom late and he’d leapt out at her, shrieking, and she’d nearly punched him. He’d laughed and laughed at the look on her face, and after a moment she’d laughed too.

It’s not long before they settle to a more sedate pace to let the horses breathe. Wyman takes one hand off his reins to hold it out to her; she nudges her horse closer to clasp it in her own.

“It’s been so long,” he says. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“I know,” she says. “I missed you too.”

“It must have been terrifying,” he says. “I can’t believe you went to Karnaca, of all places—hardly a safe choice, don’t you think? Were the bloodflies as bad as they say?”

The last time she’d written to him before she returned to Dunwall, she’d been on the _Dreadful Wale_ , newly anchored in Karnaca Harbor; she hadn’t yet begun to cut a swathe through the Grand Guard, or seen a bloodfly except in pictures. Since then she’s left Karnaca in chaos, set more bloodflies on fire than she ever cared to, and sent only a hurried note or two to arrange this trip.

“I didn’t really have a choice,” she says.

“Well, I’m sure Corvo can whip it into shape,” he says airily. “He seems the sort to enjoy squashing a few flies.”

* * *

Wyman had never liked Corvo, though he tried to hide it—poorly—beneath a sort of jaunty disdain; the feeling was entirely mutual.

He was an excellent dancer and a better rider than Emily, fond of rugby and a dab hand at billiards. He always had some sport or diversion in mind, which made a pleasant change from parties at which everyone stood around either eating too much or eating nothing at all and complaining about their figures. As empress she received invitations to every formal occasion, and sometimes she even went, but no one ever thought to invite her to the informal gatherings of the fast set.

But they did invite Wyman. Within a week of arriving he’d somehow struck up a friendly acquaintance with what seemed like every lordling and socialite in Dunwall, and embarked on an endless whirl of outings and excursions at all hours of the day and night.

He brought Emily along. At first there’d be a moment of confused stillness when she followed him through the door, followed by everyone hurrying to stand up and make their obeisances; but after a while they grew used to her, and would shout their lazy greetings from where they lounged.

Emily could have insisted they show her the respect she was due; perhaps she should have. She didn’t. Some of the glittering ladies were younger than she was, but they looked older with their lips and cheeks painted unnaturally bright, their eyelashes darkened with soot. No one had ever shown Emily how, and she’d never thought to ask her maid to do it; but they called for Serkonan wine and summoned their maids to do their skilled work, and cooed over the length of her unbraided hair.

And there were the men, too, their eyes glazed with drink and other substances, who clapped her on the shoulder and congratulated her on her success shooting pigeons, or pulled her close and taught her dances that would’ve made her pinch-mouthed dancing master sputter.

She’d always had Corvo, who would have dragged himself over broken glass for her; but that wasn’t the same as having someone who would pack a pipe with white leaf tobacco and offer it to her, or gossip and snicker over Lady Atteberry’s latest public indiscretion, or down a bottle of whiskey and go tearing along the boulevard in an open phaeton and watch the riffraff scatter.

It had been exactly two months since he’d been introduced at court, knelt before her throne and then looked up through his long eyelashes and smirked, and set her heart pounding; forty-three days since he’d cornered her in the garden and leaned in so close that she didn’t know what to do except kiss him; twenty-eight days since she’d invited him up to her bedchamber—made him wait outside while she undressed and got under the sheets—called him in, hearing her own voice waver with unfamiliar, unwelcome shyness, and jerked with shocked sensation when he touched her between her legs. She’d still been counting the days, then. She’d still been afraid of what he’d say when he saw her scars.

“I’m supposed to train with Corvo tonight,” she said.

Wyman gave her the eyes. He wanted to go to the party at Lord Lennox’s townhouse, which would inevitably last until dawn; but Emily had skipped training thrice in the last week, and tonight she was jittery and restless with too little activity.

“Come on,” he said. “Live a little.”

“After what happened to my mother, it’s better if I know how to defend myself,” she said stiffly.

Wyman made a show of looking all around, then leaned in to whisper conspiratorially. “Isn’t that what you have old doom-and-gloom here for? Make him do his job for once.”

Emily looked involuntarily over his shoulder at Corvo, who managed to convey the impression of a raised eyebrow without moving a single muscle in his face. He only got that stony when Emily was doing something he didn’t like but he felt it wasn’t his place to stop her: she was empress.

“Of course we don’t have to, if you’re not comfortable,” Wyman went on. “It isn’t your fault you’ve lived such a sheltered life—and he can hardly be blamed, after what happened—“

“Fine,” Emily said. “Let’s go,” and later ended the night by slapping an ingenue a little too inclined to get lost in Wyman’s eyes, and then puking.

By then she’d showed him her sword, her pistol; she’d taken him roof-running and he’d pronounced it an enjoyable if quaint pastime. She wasn’t sure if he realized that Corvo followed them on their excursions together, but she thought he’d be happier not knowing; he’d already tried to hint that she was too close with Corvo.

Wyman had had fencing lessons as a child, had been presented with a very pretty pair of dueling pistols upon reaching his majority and took the occasional bout with the other young aristocrats on the training ground: all in all, an accomplished gentleman, reckoned well capable of defending his honor by the standards of the court.

Emily had different standards.

* * *

The man was still groggy from the sleep dart, and half-drunk on top of that as he staggered out toward her. 

Emily was thirteen then, bigger than the child who had been easily swept up in one arm by an assassin; and trained, and much better armed, and inexperienced enough that she would’ve said she was prepared for anything. But looking up at a man more than a head taller than her and at least twice as broad, she felt trepidation stirring in her gut.

“Little girl,” he slurred. “Hey. Wha’ the fuuu—“

She unfolded her blade.

“Ha,” he said, “let’s see what’s inside you!” and lurched into motion, cleaver raised.

By then Corvo had already run her through endless hours of drills. She’d learned what seemed like every possible response to a blow: how to parry and riposte, counterattack, disarm, disengage, bring the left hand weapon into play. But faced with his charge, her lessons abandoned her: she instinctively threw her blade up in front of her face to protect herself.

Weight, gravity, and strength were all on his side: her blade only slowed the cleaver a little as it came crashing down, and she had to twist away, off balance. It left her back exposed; she knew it but she couldn’t see him, couldn’t see the next strike coming—she skittered away blindly until she almost ran into a wall and whirled back around.

If he’d pressed the advantage, things might’ve ended there. But he was approaching at a leisurely pace, grinning with anticipation.

Her hasty bolt caught him just below the knee. The leg buckled—he stumbled—and she rushed him, lashing out almost blindly.

A hot spray of blood across her face—she felt more than saw him stagger back and pursued, swinging wildly—a fist meant for her face only hit her off shoulder—

He fell and she followed him down, her head full of nothing but the one lesson which had not after all deserted her: not to stop until she was absolutely certain she’d won. A fight could be won on pure viciousness and lost on hesitation. She struck again and again until the blade bit too deeply into bone, stuck, and ripped itself from her hand—she leapt backward off him, scrabbling for her pistol—

He was still. Corvo was standing close, waiting for her to finish.

She was shaking all over. She felt overwhelmed tears welling up, and dashed them furiously away. What did she care? She’d seen more than one assassin spitted on Corvo’s blade. She’d felt the traitor’s arms loosen around her before he toppled backward into the sea. She’d seen her own mother die. The dead man was filth from the filthy streets of Dunwall, and his death was of more use than his life would ever have been.

Corvo brushed the hair out of her face where it had come loose from her braid. She gulped in a breath and buried her face in his chest like she had when she was a little girl, and he put his arms tight around her.

Before they went home, Corvo heaved the body into a bin for disposal later, but Emily took the cleaver. She washed it herself, wiped it dry, and left it on the table in her safe room.

That began the next phase of her training. It didn’t mean that she was spared doing solo drills with a lead-weighted training sword until her shoulder ached. But now at least once a week she did live drills: street toughs who had been given long enough for the dart sedative to completely wear off, or been injected with a drug that made them insensible to pain; thugs who had been given armor or a mask, or had unexpected weapons.

Corvo set her challenges: to win using only her sword—using any weapon other than sword, pistol, or crossbow—using only whatever weapon she could improve from the detritus lying about; or to pickpocket her mark before killing him; or to cross the courtyard ten times while remaining unseen.

After a while, Corvo began to take her out prowling at night. She’d spent her whole life to that point in the Tower, save for her brief stays at the Golden Cat and the Hounds Pit. Now she could explore, could listen at windows and peer in past the drapes; she could cover her face and stroll boldly down the middle of the dark street, and cede no ground to anyone. 

Inevitably, she got herself in over her head. Once, when she was sixteen, she was rifling idly through the pockets of some two-bit thug when a pair of patrolling Overseers came around the corner, each with his own hound; and then the noise of the fight drew half a dozen of the dead man’s compatriots.

She’d already dispatched the more aggressive hound of the pair—her sword met it at the apex of its leap—and with its master. Now the second Overseer was backing up with belated caution, trying to get enough space to throw a grenade; but she had to split her attention between him and his more cautious hound circling behind her.

She could have dealt with them both, but that was the moment the Bottle Street Gang entered the fray.

Their numbers were much reduced since the days when Slackjaw ruled the Distillery District; and had she been asked, Emily would have guessed that they had no great love for the Abbey either. But perhaps they were motivated more by a general antipathy for humanity, because they set on Emily directly.

She saw them coming from the corner of her eye at the same time the Overseer did; she might have used his momentary distraction to flee, but instead she closed the distance and cut the legs out from under him. Then the first of the thugs were upon her.

She met their rush head on and killed the first two easily, turned to the third—

—who blew a cloud of fire at her. She reeled back, momentarily blinded. A sudden weight dragging at her sword hand—

She’d forgotten the hound. Now its teeth sank deep into her forearm.

Her hand opened involuntarily—she dropped her sword. She kicked out, felt the dog’s ribs cave in under the steel toe of her boot—

The damage was done. Her right hand was empty, and the remaining thugs had her surrounded.

She still had her pistol. Her first shot took the fire-breather in the face. The second, too hasty, only grazed the upper arm of the one-eyed brute behind him. She paid for the mistake: his cleaver laid her thigh open, and she spent her third precious bullet to dispatch him.

Three men left. No time to reload.

She shifted the pistol to her right hand—it might serve as a bludgeon if she could get in close enough. The thug in front of her raised his cleaver high, ready to bring it down—she lifted her useless pistol to block it—

A crossbow bolt sprouted from his eye. He toppled. The second gaped down at his own arm, neatly severed at the shoulder; the next stroke took off his head.

Emily sat down hard right there in the street, beginning to feel the throbbing pain in her thigh. Corvo, sword in hand, paused a moment to make sure she wouldn’t bleed out, then chased down the fleeing survivor. No witnesses; the hagfish would eat well that night.

The final count: seven men and two dogs dead; a ragged bite on Emily’s forearm and a deep gash in the muscle of her thigh; a coat scorched past saving; and not a mark on Corvo. He wordlessly poured elixir and whiskey into the wounds—she gritted her teeth and refused to make a sound; it was her own damn fault—and sewed up her arm, then had her do her own leg. The matched set of golden masks joined the cleaver in the safe room.

She learned from her mistakes. She got better.

When she was seventeen, a footman—tall, redheaded, a recent arrival to Dunwall, as it turned out—delivered her breakfast and then tried to knife her. Corvo dropped him in his tracks with a sleep dart instead of disposing of him in the usual bloody fashion, and had him dragged off to Coldridge.

Emily didn’t think twice about it—by then she was long accustomed to assassination attempts—but she should have: when she stepped into the courtyard that night for her regular training session, instead of Corvo stepping out of the shadows, the assassin fell on her from above.

Some instinct—a stray breath of air, perhaps—had her rolling before she consciously knew why, which was the reason the assassin’s blade only carved a long groove in her thick leather vest instead of entering between neck and collarbone.

He was very fast; she was barely back on her feet, blade in hand, before he was on her again. She couldn’t get clear long enough to draw her pistol, and he was stronger at close quarters than she was. This was no opportunist—he was an assassin, trained and sent on a mission.

But even then she was the more experienced. She’d known since childhood that her life was balanced on the edge of a knife. She’d killed more men than he’d sparred with.

A flurry of blows. When they parted, he was bleeding from a shallow slice along his ribs.

They circled each other. He was warier, now; he hadn’t expected her to put up a fight.

She made the first move: came in fast and hard enough to push him back and force him to defend himself against her attack: another flurry of blows, none of them particularly powerful but each following relentlessly upon the heels of the last—drawing his guard upward until she saw the opening and drove her blade low through his belly.

She pulled it free. He wavered a moment—staggered two steps toward her and tried to lift his sword—

She dealt him a brutal diagonal stroke. He collapsed. His mouth worked for a moment, the words inaudible. Then he was still.

Emily stood over the body, panting, and then stepped back.

“You prick,” she said. “I could’ve died.”

Corvo cocked a sardonic brow at her, and after a moment she rolled her eyes and laughed.

“You can deal with the body,” she said. By then, she was tall enough to look him in the eye.

The next week she met Wyman. She skipped more training sessions at his behest than she should have, but Corvo had done his work well.

Emily had asked Corvo to train her, all those years ago, and he’d done it to the best of his ability; though she knew if he’d had his way, it always would’ve been him throwing his own body between her and danger. It was, she realized one muggy, sleepless night in Karnaca, why he’d never fought beside her: the only reason she’d ever have to fight for herself was if he wasn’t there.

* * *

“Mother,” Wyman says, “may I present to you Empress Emily Kaldwin. Emily, my mother, Lady Ashbrook.”

“Your majesty,” she says with cool courtesy. “We are honored by your presence. Welcome to Doneraile House.”

“Thank you,” Emily says, trying to remember how to be gracious. “It’s a pleasure to be here.”

Lady Ashbrook is a tall woman with the same green eyes as her son; though her expression is set in more severe lines, they soften as she accepts Wyman’s hug. She’s fifteen or twenty years older than Emily’s own mother would have been, but her back is still straight, her posture unbowed, her face still smooth except for the old scar that pulls down one corner of her mouth. Perhaps that’s why she’s never spent much time at court.

Corvo had presented Emily with the report sometime after the second long afternoon she’d spent alone with Wyman; which was to say that it had appeared on her desk without comment or fanfare. She’d rolled her eyes and tossed it aside; but of course later that night she’d retrieved and read it.

There were thirteen years between Wyman and the next youngest of his three siblings. Their father Lord Ashbrook had been thrown from his horse not long after Wyman’s birth; he survived the fall, but was bedridden thereafter until his death several years later. Management of the estate had fallen to Lady Ashbrook, whose line—cousin to that of her husband—could be traced back nearly to the Great Burning: older than that of the upstart kings of Morley, older than the Abbey of the Everyman.

The Abbey holds that the souls of the faithful dead pass into the Void and there receive the mercy of oblivion; those of the wicked are doomed to drift until they are devoured. The body, left behind, is merely a useless shell to be disposed of as temporal custom demands.

The heretics of Morley have their own beliefs. Callista, whose lectures had grown steadily more grim as the plague turned the city into a mass grave, had made a lesson of them one afternoon, trying to hold Emily’s attention while Corvo was gone.

Before the Abbey came, it was the custom of the common people of Morley to bury their dead—and exhume them again once the worms have done their work. Then the skull is tenderly washed with cider and water, the clean bones moved by procession to their final resting place, and only then are the rites accounted complete; only then is the soul freed to join its ancestors. And woe to those without family to tend to their bones—their trapped souls wear away little by little until the Outsider catches their tattered remains in the net of his teeth.

The Overseers stopped up the great catacombs under Alba and Fraeport, Caulkenny and Wynnedown, and burned at the stake any found trying to keep the old ways. Now, in the cities, under the nose of the Abbey, the dead lie undisturbed under the stifling earth—Callista said, her hair lank and dull, an eerie shadow falling across her thin, thin face—but who knows what the country folk do among the hills, or the aristocracy on their ancient estates?

The next day, of course, she had been wrapped in a sack and shot in the head. Such are the dangers of associating with royalty.

When the plague came to Dunwall, it first reared its ugly head in the slums. But its spread was swift. It was months yet before the blockade, before the thin hope that was the elixir, when Wyman’s cousin and her husband sailed home from Dunwall, bringing with them their infant son and the shrouded body of their first child. (Was it the unwashed hands of the cook, the busy scales of the shopkeep, the rat nosing among the barrels and casks in some dark cellar that infected them? Was it his lordship’s paramour, or her ladyship’s?)

Lady Ashbrook sent a messenger to meet them at the docks: a place had been prepared for them where they could recuperate in peace. 

There were family armsmen keeping watch. When the three had entered the cottage, the armsmen swiftly barred the windows and doors.

There was a month’s worth of food and drink in the cottage. Every morning a servant knocked, and waited to hear the response: first the angry shouting of the lady, her husband’s pleas; then a more subdued answer; at last only a dull returning knock.

There came a day when there was no response at all, and Lady Ashbrook ordered fire set to the cottage. It burned to the ground. Three souls lost; but there would be no plague at Doneraile House.

“Mother is very decisive, and she’s always right,” Wyman said some years later, with a laugh and a shrug—not about the doomed cousin; Lady Ashbrook had indicated her disapproval of another cousin’s intended, and Wyman was annoyed at the young couple’s melodramatics. His cousin, who under ordinary circumstances was always game for a scrape, had pronounced himself too distressed for their usual escapades. “Good thing I’m her favorite.”

Emily had met one of Wyman’s less favored brothers, Lord Donal, a stolid heavyset man who’d visited Dunwall more than once as an emissary from the king in Morley, who had inherited his father’s hot temper, restrained for the nonce by advisors who were more interested profiting from trade in wool and spirits; and their sister, too, briefly and by accident—Lady Lile, only passing through Dunwall on her way to Serkonos to conduct some business.

The other brother is present tonight: Keane, in whose face the decade he has on Wyman shows as deep lines bracketing his sour mouth; and Lady Caitriona, his wife, and their young twins, Roisin and Lucas, both with the striking green Ashbrook eyes.

They sit down to dinner in the great hall, where a portrait of Lord Ashbrook presides over the long table—the thistle of Morley in his hand, a naked sword held across his lap—and guards stand carefully blank-faced against the wall. Etiquette dictates that Emily should open the conversation, so she makes a few perfunctory remarks; the answers she receives are polite but without warmth. Even the children are very quiet, casting uncertain glances at her. 

It’s fine. Of late, she’s been taking a certain satisfaction in holding silent state dinners in Dunwall Tower, all the nobles quiet as mice.

She doesn’t bother to keep the conversation going. Instead, she stabs a sliver of meat with one hand and puts the other high on Wyman’s thigh under the table, and enjoys his involuntary intake of air before he drops his own hand heavily on top of hers.

One course later, he slides his foot up the back of her leg. Emily suppresses a shiver.

Lady Caitriona is looking across the table at her. Emily smirks at her; she looks away. Next to her, Lord Keane is frowning at Wyman.

Third course. Dessert. Then it ought to be time for port and cigars, but Wyman makes their excuses—so sorry, Emily’s tired after her journey—

As soon as the doors close behind them they’re off, racing to his chambers. Emily lets Wyman beat her, only because he actually knows where they’re going. At the top of the stairs she slows down, drops back; when he reaches his door and turns to look for her, she grins at him and saunters slowly closer, stripping off her gloves.

They go two rounds—she lets him toss her on the bed and do the all the work, then rolls him over and rides him to a vocal finish—before taking a breather; then they’re on for a third.

Afterward they sprawl in comfortable silence and Emily lets her mind go pleasantly blank for the first time in ages. Wyman’s bed is very soft. Her hair came loose from its knot at some point; Wyman is playing with it, tickling her shoulder with the ends. Then he lets go and scoops up her left hand.

“What’s this? Some kind of exotic Serkonan design?” he says, and without waiting for a reply, “Tattooed like a common sailor! Don’t tell me you had adventures without me. Emily, you know I don’t like it when you’re in danger.”

She pull her hand away. “It’s not very safe to be an empress without a throne, either,” she says. “How exactly do you think I took it back?”

“Don’t be like that,” he says. “I’m only concerned for your safety.”

“If you were so worried, you could’ve sent me a little fucking money with your soppy note,” she snaps before she can think about it. She hasn’t forgotten scraping for coin for the first time in her life, stealing from registers and looting the pockets of dead guardsmen. She hadn’t realized she was still annoyed about that. Two months of letting her sword speak for her have stripped the iron fist of the velvet glove, and she hasn’t quite managed to put it back on again. She used to pretend to care for manners, propriety, the feelings of others, the things her tutors tried to tell her mattered; but none of them helped her when Delilah came.

Wyman laughs at her. “You were fine,” he says. “How bad could it possibly have been? Just because you had to leave your tower—”

“I’m tired,” she says. The afterglow has deserted her. “Can we just go to sleep?”

But it’s been too long. She hasn’t shared a bed since he left Dunwall; she keeps twitching awake at his every shift and sigh, but he seems to have no such problem.

She finally falls asleep sometime in the wee hours, only to wake too early to the sun streaming in the open window. Wyman’s already up and mostly dressed, stretched out in a chair.

Emily performs her morning ablutions and dresses herself: shirt and pants, boots and coat with all its heavy hidden pockets, pistol at her side and folded blade in her sleeve.

“Come on,” Wyman says, shifting from foot to foot, “there’s no need for that here. What, are you going to stab a deer?”

“It’s been a rough year,” Emily says. She went unarmed to her mother’s memorial ceremony. It won’t happen again.

He rolls his eyes. “If it makes you feel better,” he says.

Downstairs, breakfast has been laid out. Keane is already at the table, alone; he nods to them and rises to leave.

They eat and then take a picnic lunch with them. Doneraile House’s grounds are extensive, more like the Grand Palace in Serkonos than Dunwall Tower perched high above the river on one side and the encroaching city on the other.

They stop by the kennels, which are full of long-haired deerhounds with tall slender bodies and narrow elegant heads, lounging about with steady patience and waiting for the hunt. There’s a litter of newborn puppies, their eyes still closed, squirming over each other like rats to suckle from their mother.

They leave when the master of hounds shows up to feed the dogs, and go punting on the river, then eat their own lunch on the shore in the late afternoon. Emily’s considering what else they might get up to on the soft grass, when Wyman turns to her.

“I have something to show you,” he says.

He leads her away from the manicured part of the grounds, to where the carefully tended grass gives way to heather and crumbling stone, and then further on yet, following a winding footpath up among the hills until they reach it, incongruous: a door.

From the outside it looks like the sort of shed a groundskeeper might keep his tools in, half-built into the hill; but when Wyman opens the door, the space inside stretches back into impenetrable darkness.

It might have begun as a mine, in a time before great engines driven by whale oil, when men went into the darkness with their picks and lanterns. In the present, though, Wyman reaches over her shoulder to flip a switch on the wall, and the tunnel is illuminated with the familiar cold glow of electric lights. 

The floor beneath them has been worn smooth by the passage of many feet. “What is this?” Emily says. “The ancestral cheese cave?”

It takes her a moment longer to realize than it should, perhaps, but in her defense, Emily’s only ever heard it described once, fifteen years ago: the walls honeycombed with alcoves, each of which contains—

“Not exactly,” Wyman says, smug. He gestures dramatically toward one of the largest alcoves, in which a skull rests atop a neatly arranged stack of bones: the long bones standing upright in the cradle of the pelvis at the bottom and held in the cage of the ribs, the column of the spine—two of the vertebrae fractured and healed misaligned—laid across the front. “Meet my father.”

Does he think this as inconsequential as the scandalous party games they played in Dunwall in whispers and shrieks of laughter, invoking the Outsider and gossiping about which family was having an freakish run of good fortune or madness? Even then Emily had known it was all fake: Corvo kept no shrine, said no prayers, performed no rituals, only sometimes clenched his hand a little and disappeared, or peered out from behind someone else’s eyes.

This, though, this—the Abbey’s back might have been broken in Karnaca, in Dunwall; but the survivors are warier for it, angrier, more suspicious of any sign of heresy and less gentle in rooting it out. They are not always guided by prudence in confronting the titled and wealthy.

Wyman seems to think her silence is shock or squeamishness; he puts a consoling arm around her. “Buck up,” he says. “They’re not going to hurt you.”

“As if,” Emily says. “I’m still waiting to see something worth the hike.”

As they continue on, the alcoves which were first generously sized grow smaller, set closer together, more clumsily chiseled out of the rock, the bones older. Wyman doesn’t seem to find anything in the least disturbing or out of the ordinary about it.

There’s a door at the end, its elaborate carvings gone blurry with age; but it swings open on well-oiled hinges to reveal a low wide room. The walls seem to have a strange texture, like cobblestones—until Emily looks closer and sees that each bump is the end of a bone, all of them stacked up to the ceiling.

At the far end is a low altar draped with rich blue cloth embroidered in gold, upon which a bounty of offerings has been laid out: silver dishes holding bread and apples, cheese and butter, roasted meat and jellied ox tongue, all of it clearly freshly replaced.

“Nice place for a party,” Emily says.

Wyman winks at her. “What the Abbey doesn’t know won’t hurt them.

“I’m glad Mother likes you,” he goes on. “She doesn’t usually have kind things to say about Gristol, but she told me I should bring you here.”

“Your mother—” she starts to say sharply, but as he steps toward the altar, the Mark on her hand pulses once, a cold so deep it burns. The edges of the room fade out—an unnatural wind begins to howl—and they’re in the Void.

Every time she’s been here, she’s had to chase the Outsider and his visions. This time, the shades come to her.

Her grandmother the empress, Beatrix Blayne Kaldwin, whom Emily knows only from portraits—blood streaming down her thighs, a blue-faced infant cradled in her arms; and her grandfather the emperor, Euhorn Jacob Kaldwin, first of his line: his face frozen in a final rictus of agony, his hands clutching at his chest.

Emily’s own mother, high collar and white sleeves, her soft hands pressing uselessly at the wound in her belly as if to hold her lifeblood in—betrayed, betrayed. Her father put down more than one rebellion, and Emily dealt with her bastard half-sister; she’d never had to face the violence that is the imperial birthright until it killed her. Emily has been steeping in it since childhood.

And finally, every last doppelgänger: Delilah, face melting in the heat of an incendiary bolt. Delilah, half her jaw blown away by an explosive bullet. Delilah, neck broken. Delilah, with a very familiar sword shoved through her chest.

But the Void remembers more than only the imperial dead. Wyman makes a wordless sound when the next vision announces itself.

Lord Ashbrook, but not as he appeared in his portrait—his face sunken in, his legs withered to sticks. A couple and a child between them, all three bleeding from the eyes. Others whose identity Emily can only guess at: a woman whose beautiful face bears the total laxity of laudanum, a bubble of spittle at the corner of her lips; an old man, eyes bulging in the moment of asphyxiation; a girl, very young, with a malformed baby in her arms; and yet more stretching out behind them: opened wrists and bullet wounds, bloody wounds and sepsis, childbirth and every kind of disease, the fading panic of drowning and the peculiar peace of hypothermia.

And then, coming to the front—

Lord Keane, blood congealed around the gaping wound at the side of his neck and soaking into the same coat he was wearing this morning—

Kaldwin’s Bridge rises around them, and swinging from its cold girders in the eternal night of the Void:

Lady Caitriona, hanged. Lucas and Roisin, their weightless little bodies—hanged. Lord Donal, hanged. Lady Lile, hanged. Lady Ashbrook, hanged, her green eyes plucked out—

The wind gives one last shriek, and Emily and Wyman are no longer in the abyss; only standing in a crypt, amid the detritus of a thousand years of violence: warring clans and warring isles, heresy and empire and rebellion and private misery, private cruelty.

Wyman’s handsome, idiotic face has gone white.

“Please, Emily,” he says, stumbling over his own words, “they didn’t mean—they wouldn’t—Emily—”

“Your majesty,” she says. He stares back, wild-eyed.

“Your majesty,” he says too rapidly, “please—”

Behind them, the door whispers open. Emily reaches for her sword.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is on tumblr [here](http://bloodbright.tumblr.com/post/164984405951/ask-no-land-beyond-bloodbright-dishonored).


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